Simon Willison’s Weblog

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25 items tagged “timbray”

2024

And now, in Anno Domini 2024, Google has lost its edge in search. There are plenty of things it can’t find. There are compelling alternatives. To me this feels like a big inflection point, because around the stumbling feet of the Big Tech dinosaurs, the Web’s mammals, agile and flexible, still scurry. They exhibit creative energy and strongly-flavored voices, and those voices still sometimes find and reinforce each other without being sock puppets of shareholder-value-focused private empires.

Tim Bray # 20th January 2024, 12:13 pm

2022

Making Code Faster. Tim Bray’s detailed guide to using the Go profiler. # 13th June 2022, 7:40 pm

2021

I’m pretty convinced that the biggest single contributor to improved software in my lifetime wasn’t object-orientation or higher-level languages or functional programming or strong typing or MVC or anything else: It was the rise of testing culture.

Tim Bray # 1st June 2021, 2:35 pm

2018

When you’re pump­ing mes­sages around the In­ter­net be­tween het­ero­ge­neous code­bas­es built by peo­ple who don’t know each oth­er, shit is gonna hap­pen. That’s the whole ba­sis of the We­b: You can safe­ly ig­nore an HTTP head­er or HTML tag you don’t un­der­stand, and noth­ing break­s. It’s great be­cause it al­lows peo­ple to just try stuff out, and the use­ful stuff catch­es on while the bad ideas don’t break any­thing.

Tim Bray # 1st September 2018, 1:41 am

2010

The Net is the greatest listening engine ever devised. These days anyone can choose, with its help, to be well-informed. You have to make the effort to figure out which key people are really on top of what you care about, so that you can start listening to them. Plus, you need to deploy some saved searches. Once you’ve done these things, then when you turn your computer on in the morning, it’ll tell you if anything’s happened that you need to know about.

Tim Bray # 10th February 2010, 5:40 pm

What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise.

Tim Bray # 6th January 2010, 8:20 am

2009

Developing for the iPhone at the moment is like picking up dimes in front of a bulldozer.

Tim Bray # 21st September 2009, 5:30 pm

Ravelry. Tim Bray interviews Casey Forbes, the single engineer behind Ravelry, the knitting community that serves 10 million Rails requests a day using just seven physical servers, MySQL, Sphinx, memcached, nginx, haproxy, passenger and Tokyo Cabinet. # 3rd September 2009, 6:50 pm

I propose that the World Wide Web would serve well as a framework for structuring much of the academic Computer Science curriculum. A study of the theory and practice of the Web’s technologies would traverse many key areas of our discipline.

Tim Bray # 16th July 2009, 10:16 am

Test-Driven Heresy. Tim Bray advocates TDD for maintenance development, but argues that it may not be as useful during the exploratory, greenfield development phase of a project. # 24th June 2009, 11:03 am

The Web vs. the Fallacies. Tim Bray on how the architecture of the Web helps developers handle the Fallacies of Distributed Computing. # 25th May 2009, 11:49 pm

2008

Are we so deranged here in the twenty-first century that we’re going to re-enact, wide-eyed, the twin tragedies of the great desktop-suite lock-in and the great proprietary-SQL lock-in? You know, the ones where you give a platform vendor control over your IT budget? Gimme a break.

Tim Bray # 15th October 2008, 5:09 pm

Multi-Inflection-Point Alert. Dammit, Tim, stop giving away our competitive advantages! # 26th April 2008, 6:48 pm

The strain due to the fact that most business desktops are locked into the Microsoft platform, at a time when both the Apple and GNU/Linux alternatives are qualitatively safer, better, and cheaper to operate, will start to become impossible to ignore.

Tim Bray # 3rd January 2008, 1:08 pm

2007

Thai personal names (via) “Family names were allocated to families systematically and the use of family names is still controlled by the government. Any two people in Thailand with the same family name are related.” # 8th December 2007, 4:26 pm

WS-dämmerung. Tim Bray collects the latest round of WS-* repenting, which saves me from linking to them individually. # 22nd November 2007, 9:49 am

Some Notes on Tim Bray’s Wide Finder Benchmark. Fredrik Lundh demonstrates some Python ninja techniques for parsing log files using multiple cores (and eventually memory mapping). # 7th October 2007, 1:06 am

The Rubinius Sprint. Sun are throwing a ton of resources at Ruby, because as Tim Bray says, “it’s not fast enough”. Imagine where they’d be if they’d invested this kind of support in Jython five years ago... # 21st September 2007, 11:32 pm

There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things

Phil Karlton # 5th July 2007, 12:46 am

If you write a spec, write a validator alongside. How much pain could have been spared with early versions of RSS if we’d had a common, agreed upon validator. In short, it’s the test suite that ultimately decides the spec.

Joe Heck # 30th May 2007, 1:48 am

Ten Reasons The World Needs Patent Covenants (via) Sun just made their OpenID patent covenant official. Simon Phipps explains why these are a Good Idea. # 22nd May 2007, 5:09 pm

People don’t recognize how important URIs are. The notion that you have a huge, world-scale, information space, and that everything in it has an name and they’re all just short strings that you can paint on the side of a bus; that’s a new thing and a good thing.

Tim Bray # 2nd May 2007, 8:23 pm

In the big picture, Twitter did exactly the right thing. They had a good idea and they buckled down and focused on delivering something as cool as possible as fast as possible, and it’s really hard, in early 2007, to beat Rails for that. When all of a sudden there were a few tens of thousands of people using it, then they went to work on the scaling.

Tim Bray # 14th April 2007, 9:13 am

2006

Seems easy to me; if you want to serialize a data structure that’s not too text-heavy and all you want is for the receiver to get the same data structure with minimal effort, and you trust the other end to get the i18n right, JSON is hunky-dory.

Tim Bray # 22nd December 2006, 12:47 am

2003

Tim Bray on RSS

Tim Bray: RSS Needs Fixing:

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